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Goliath At Bay

As a result, the Eastern Internet hubs also began to tilt. An obvious solution seemed to be to have FIX West, the government hub at Ames, take over the traffic that was fleeing the Pacific Bell NAP.

Savvy residents of Silicon Valley, the Ames management was sympathetic. Then Medin gained the blessing of NSF networking chief Steve Wolff and enlisted Jack Waters at MCI, a crucial Internet backbone supplier that no longer used its PacBell connection.

Within two weeks, Medin created a system comparable in capacity and reliability to the original FIX, with expanded Net management capabilities, power supplies, communications ports and routing facilities. The result was a broadband national peering-and-exchange point, with a cumulative capacity of some 10 gigabits per second. It combined traffic from all the major commercial Internet suppliers with the bitstreams from government laboratories and agencies.

Meanwhile, throughout this period of crisis and turbulence, no ordinary Internet customer experienced any untoward deterioration of service. Although Medin’s contribution was only part of a major national effort, he became the talk of the Net. Doerr had to sign him up.

AS DOERR SUMS IT UP, “Milo was running the largest IP net in the federal government. When they decided to set up a White House.gov Web site, they asked where to put it. They put it on Milo’s server. Milo helped run the fiber ring around Moscow. Internet connections for Australia and Antarctica and for deep space probes ran through Milo. He was supplying IP connectivity for the entire Scandinavian subcontinent. He had some 200 remote nodes. And he ran it all with some 99.98% uptime.”

@Home CEO Will Hearst of Kleiner Perkins likes to tell a story that gives some clues as to how this young Net nerd from NASA became a legend in his own time: “In 1988, a Finn—call him Lars—hacks his way into Milo’s computers. Ticks Milo off. He does a trace route and finds his way back to the administrator of the domain in Finland. It’s an academic site. Milo already knows Lars’ IP address. You can’t hide from Milo. He says to the administrator, “We have a problem. Please have a conversation with Lars.” That upset the Finns, who say, “We are not going to do that! We respect civil liberties here! You can post a complaint if you like, but we can’t tell the guy what to do.” So Milo goes into a slow boil. Says, “I’ll give you about 30 minutes to get that guy’s files off our machine.”

“Nothing happens. So Milo issues an order: “Take down Scandinavia.” The switch is pulled. Three countries go dark. They don’t notice it immediately, but pretty soon e-mail messages are not getting returned. At last, three senior administrators go to Lars, so the story goes, and they say: “We don’t care if you hack into the CIA; we don’t care if you bring down NSA; and we don’t mind if you abscond with all the financial bits in the Federal Reserve. But don’t mess with Milo at NASA.’

“The Finns called back Milo, said the situation had been taken care of. Milo said fine and put the service back up.”

Now DOERR and Medin are again confronting the perennial doomsday adventists who gather on mountaintops of slightly older money and disparage the future of the Net, talking crisis, overload, overhype, overvaluation. Tragedy of the Commons. The experts are chiming in. From Howard Anderson of the Yankee Group to Andrew Seybold and Bob Metcalfe, leading analysts are prophesying a crash in 1996.
Medin has been there before. The answer to traffic jams on a narrowband Net is creation of a broadband Net. Don’t tell him it is not technically possible. Who are you kidding? This is the age of the telecosm.

Bill Gates, though, thinks it is the age of middleband. It is obvious beyond cavil to Gates that his regime, ruling 80% of the world’s computers, is destined to prevail. He commands a market share so overwhelming that Washington’s antitrusters see it as a monopoly in need of government dissolution. For Gates, among the most ludicrous claims to be validated by the mantra “on the Internet,” is the idea that Windows machines are an inferior minority system difficult to digest in the prevailing habitat of Unix and TCP/IP.

To Medin, however, it is a matter of simple fact that Windows and NT are awkward systems, hard to incorporate in his domains except as mere terminals. To Medin, Unix is the heart of the Internet, the matrix of creativity in networking, the bearer of thousands of programs and services and tools and scripts and languages that together comprise the pullulating fabric of the rampantly growing Web. So far, Medin has a strong case.

Sixty percent of the managers of Internet host computers use Macintoshes as their preferred personal machine. On the Internet, as a platform for servers, whether for the World Wide Web, e-mail, FTP, Telnet, Gopher or NEWS, Microsoft’s favored NT now ranks seventh, with a 4% share, behind Sun, which commands a 56% share, Apple, Silicon Graphics, IBM, Digital Equipment and Windows 3.1.

Around the time that Gates was assuring me of Microsoft’s impregnable position with @Home, Medin was reviewing the Seattle company’s software concepts for his new network. The @Home people wanted to adopt Microsoft’s Explorer browser if they could (TCI favored its interactive TV ally), but it was simply impossible. Explorer ran on neither Unix nor Macs, and could not handle multicasting.

Netscape’s browser already worked with all the existing systems, including the various Windows.

Under the influence of Marc Andreessen, who had learned networking in the broadband 45-megabit-per-second environment of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Netscape had long ago left behind all the comforts of middleband. Andreessen was eager for broadband connections. Gates was not even in the game that Medin and Andreessen were playing.

All right, suppose that “browsers are a trivial technology,” as Gates told me dismissively. It was servers that Microsoft really wanted to sell to @Home. Their Gibraltar system was running Microsoft’s somewhat balky internal Internet at a pace some four times faster than Netscape’s server might.

Here, Microsoft benefited from its homogeneous campus environment. Netscape had to employ the “union” code-using the lowest-common- denominator instructions to coordinate several varieties of Unix, Mac and Windows NT. Meanwhile, Microsoft could optimize Gibraltar for all the most powerful instructions in Windows NT, so it was much faster.

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